Men Behind the Sun

Most of the movies on this list are either semiofficial classics or sequel-spawning hits, and all but five are in some way American. Time for an Asian weirdie that is both obscure and, to those who’ve seen it or just heard about it, notorious. The Chinese-Taiwanese docudrama Men Behind the Sun, a.k.a. Squadron 731, details the sadistic experiments undertaken by Japanese physician Shiro Ishi during his country’s occupation of Manchuria. Director Mou Tun-fei, or T.F. Mou, parades the atrocities of a man whose intestines explode out of his anus (faked), a dead boy who is slit open to have his organs removed (supposedly using the corpse of a child who’d died the day before) and, most infamously, a cat that is eaten alive by hundreds of rats. You could say it’s instructive; supposedly there’s nothing shown that Ishi didn’t do. Or you could say this is splatter porn in its purest, most toxic form.